TWELVE WAYS PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT CAN EXACERABE AND MAGNIFY EMOTIONAL ABERRATIONS
TWELVE WAYS PSYCHIATRIC TREATMENT CAN EXACERABE AND MAGNIFY EMOTIONAL ABERRATIONS
By
David Gottfried
People have often said that psychiatric treatment can make one crazier. However only rarely have people explained precisely how psychotherapy and other modes of therapy (psychotropic drugs, etc.) can worsen one’s mental status. Because people have failed to itemize and explain the adverse effects of psychiatry, I suspect that many people, upon hearing that shrinks make people crazier, chuckle good-naturedly, pretend to agree with the charge but privately reason that it’s all a lot of bunk.
They may conclude that people with emotional problems are apt to be malcontents, cry babies or chronic complainers and that their allegations are worth nothing next to the credentials of an arrogant, affluent board certified psychiatrist. Therefore, it is high time that the detrimental effects of psychiatry be delineated with specificity. The following is a preliminary list of the ways in which therapy can exacerbate psychopathology. Two of the following twelve specific ways have been noted by other doctors, and those doctors’ names are mentioned in this essay. I developed the remaining ten ideas.
1) The transference process in reverse. Because a patient might spend so much time with his therapist, and because the patient might enjoy talking about his troubles with his therapist, he may make the mistake of treating friends, associates and even competitors as if they were his therapist.
This will, for obvious reasons, imperil all relationships. His friends will not want to know him because he spends all of his time talking about his problems, and his competitors learn his strategies and secrets because he can’t shut up. The ensuing loss of friends, because he talks about his problems all day long, and loss of economic and professional stature, because he has blabbed to his competitors, will facilitate emotional decline.
Interestingly enough, Freud said that one will project onto one’s therapist one’s feelings towards one’s Father, and other significant persons, and thereby “work through” his problems with his Father. He never discussed the possibility that the patient might treat other people like his therapist.
2) The Amplification of Historical Agony. By talking about his problems forever and a day, his problems, and the underlying infantile traumas, may be magnified, Eric Fromm, “The Crisis of Psychoanalysis” circa 1970.
(Many people may think that anything having to do with psychoanalysis is irrelevant since most therapists no longer practice Freudian analysis. However, many therapists who do not adhere to the rigid strictures laid down by Freud have incorporated many of his ideas and treatment strategies into their work. In psychotherapy, he is practically ubiquitous.)
3) The Therapist as a Mute. Very often, a patient may mention a hardship or trauma and the therapist won’t say a damn thing. If he says anything, he might say, “How does it make you feel when you can’t get it up and your girlfriend says you’re a fag.” Exchanges like this, with one’s therapist, can make one absolutely apoplectic with RAGE.
There is a reason the doctor is either a mute or says obnoxious things. Freud said (And most therapists who don’t adhere to Freud follow this piece of Freudian procedure) that the therapist should be very, very reticent about expressing opinions. For example, if the patient said, “My brother died,” the doctor should not express his sorrow because it might make it harder for the patient to say “I am glad my brother died because he was a son of a bitch.”
However, the doctor doesn’t tell the patient that to make it easier for the patient to express himself fully, he will be mute. The muteness drives the patient bonkers. After a few years of this, the patient will think the therapist is deliberately trying to make him mad, in which case another therapist will lock him up in a psych ward.
4) Therapy can foster mistrust and, consequently, loneliness.
The analyst says: I like you
You give the analyst money.
If you stop giving him money,
He stops seeing you.
You learn that representations of friendship are bogus.
The therapist is seen as a friend-prostitute.
Before starting therapy, the patient probably had some difficulty in getting along with other people. These problems will now be immeasurably exacerbated because the therapist has seeded mistrust into every corner of his life.
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5) Therapy fosters the development of three of Bleuler’s 4 A’s of schizophrenia, or four symptoms of schizophrenia that sport the letter A.
Autism. In therapy, the patient learns to focus on himself, analyze himself and turn inward so he can better assess his psyche. The patient is developing the trait of autism (Not to be confused with the diagnostic label autistic), a preoccupation with one’s own problems. This is considered consistent with psychosis.
6) Inappropriate Affect. In therapy, the patient may learn to talk of himself in what therapist’s consider an intellectualized, alienated fashion. Also, he has talked about his problems in therapy on so many occasions and for so long that there is no longer any spontaneity or genuine feeling when he discusses his problems. This is an example of inappropriate affect, a trait which is considered consistent with schizophrenia.
7) Loose Associations. In psychoanalysis, the patient may be told to free associate or to mention whatever pops into his head. The patient therefore learns to speak in a meandering, unfocused and sometimes illogical manner. If the Patient free associates long enough, free association may be the way he speaks with everyone. Free associative speech is deemed consistent with schizophrenia. Then again, it might help to free associate. Donald Trump free associated when he spoke, and he won in 2016 and got 47 percent of the vote in 2020 despite being criminally negligent with respect to Covid.
8) You may be induced to behave like other disturbed people. Some years back, psychiatric centers for disturbed people were acclaimed for providing a “therapeutic milieu.” This was sometimes called “milieu therapy.” I suppose the basic idea was that being in an institution with a bunch of nurses flashing phony, tight-lipped smiles all day long made one feel loved, yadda, yadda, yadda. The doctors who came up with this fart of an idea forgot about another one of their theories which completely shot down the idea of milieu therapy. Freud said that one of our defenses was the tendency to identify with the aggressor, i.e., when A assails us, we are induced to act like A. In a psychiatric institution, the patient may run into lots of hostile fellow patients. When they attack him, he may tend to become more like them. With a whole lot of crazy fellow patients running around, the patient may pick up quite a cornucopia of offensive and maladaptive traits.
9) The Sullying of your Sense of Self. Be seeing therapists, you will learn to see yourself as a disturbed person.
10) Which facts matter and which facts are flotsam. A patient may recall three childhood traumas, he relays them to his therapist, and the therapist’s sense of the patient turns on these traumas. However the patient may have sustained 1000 traumas that he does not discuss because they are so painful that they have been submerged into the unconscious.
11) The Elusiveness of Truth. The patient may tell the doctor about his background but the patient is hardly an objective, dispassionate observer. What happened in the shadowy beginnings of his life are always in doubt.
12) Imposing the text book on the patient. When we study a patient, our analysis should be based on what we see in that patient. We should not assume that our patient’s problems mimic the problems of people in our textbooks. Binswanger, a leader of existentialist psychoanalysts, argued that psychoanalysis all too often tried to fit patients into the molds of its famous patients from Freud’s Vienna. Since Freud’s little Hans’ fear of horses stemmed from his fear that his Father would castrate him, your fears have something to do with castration and the Oedipus complex, or so some doctors would say. These doctors, instead of trying to “illuminate the infantile amnesia,” would "push" the patient toward "accepting" certain truths about himself. Usually, this entailed pressing the patient to understand that his father was a wimp, that his mother was a bitch, and that he was seriously at risk of being a faggot. This, essentially, constituted the whole of American psychoanalysis from the end of World War Two until the end of the 1960's. They don’t do this anymore. Now, I suppose they assume that your problems stem from patriarchal persecution.
13. For the love of drugs. I assume my readers know what I am talking about. Besides, I am tired. Goodnight.